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Casio Unveils New Color Screen Graphing Calculator
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by hobbyist calculator programmers, Casio has recently unveiled new graphing calculator models, the Casio fx-CG10/20 series, less than a year after Texas Instruments released the TI-Nspire Touchpad. The calculators features a 65536 colors screen (16-bit) with a resolution of 384x216 pixels, 16 MB of Flash memory (10 available for the user) and 140 hours of battery life. The calculators will retail starting at $129.99. Although Casio's new calculator official page have limited information about the calculator programming capabilities and processor speed, could this eventually mark the end of TI's reign in North American schools?"
What I don't get is why someone would spend $150 on a calculator when you could get a netbook with a gig of RAM and 180 gigs of drive space with a dual core processor for the price of two of them. Kubuntu comes with a scientific calculator, and it's a free OS you can replace Windows with or install dual-boot.
I just don't know why anyone would buy a calculator, period.
Free Martian Whores!
The fact that graphing calculators of quite modest specs and build still cost so much is a gooey blob of saliva in the face of idealist theories of competition.
However, the fact that graphing calculators are still of quite modest specs isn't.
The market for calculators is, basically, tests. They might also be used for homework and the occasional foray into programming; but they are basically purchased for tests. In a testing environment, wifi and 16GB of internal storage are not, shall we say, of much use in maintaining a fair testing environment.
Even if you make the "If the test is good, flashcards won't help you, and neither will notes stored on a calculator/iPod/whatever" argument(which is arguably a lot truer at higher levels), that still doesn't address the issue of network connected devices.
Imagine the following: iPod touch/iPhone with camera, internet connection, some sort of web conferencing software. Pay 29.95 at the paypal portal and, for the duration of the test if you get stuck on a problem, take a picture of it, and a suitably educated person in India solves it and sends back an image of the solution. Win/win(sort of). The cheater can get past even "mere facts won't save you" questions, and someone in a lower cost of living country makes comparatively good money solving easy problems in their area of expertise. The test, of course, becomes useless.
Intentionally limited devices for pedagogical purposes are eminently sensible. It's just that it should be pretty simple to stamp out a TI-83(or 89, the hardware doesn't exactly differ wildly) for absolute peanuts, not $100 a pop.
No... RPN has more advantages than you claim, and people who have become adept at it (not just learned it as a token thing, but really learned to think in that way) almost never want to go back.
(1) You can see intermediate results of your calculations as you go along.
(2) Fewer keystrokes are needed to perform computations, so there are fewer opportunities for mistakes.
(3) For highly proficient users, RPN allows for faster use of the calculator because of not having to enter and track lots of parens.
It's a similar situation to texting on a cell phone vs touch typing. If you are used to texting and never learned to touch type, you won't truly realize how much of a superior input system touch typing is.
But more and more our world is moving away from things that require any degree of learned skill, in favor of no or low-skill methods which yield inferior results.
Underpowered also means runs on a quartet of AAA's for months...
No, it doesn't.
Take this example:
(5 + 3) * (3 + 2)
When we think and calculate it in our head, we take 5 and 3, add them to get 8. Then we take 3 and 2, add them, and get 5. Finally, we multiply 8 by 5 to get 40.
And guess what? That's exactly how RPN does it. Including giving you the intermediate results of 8 and 5.
Infix means you can't do the multiplication because you don't know what to multiply with at that point.
(If trying to force the multiplication earlier by expanding, you get "5 + 3 = 8, 8 * 3 = 24, 8 * 2 = 16, add 24 and 16 to get 40", but that still requires doing a calculation on the right hand side of the operation before jumping back to it.)
I do think that education could use refocusing now that we live in a world where you cell phone instantly provides you with any answer you want, but throwing out -all- memorization would be overdoing it. You need a framework of knowledge before you start googling specific answers, and I think we benefit as a society when we have some common sense of history, science, literature, etc. I think many of us here can probably agree that if more Americans knew how often and how badly theocracies have failed, how bloody the crusades were, and how pointlessly violent religion and politics mixed in Europe, that our country might be better off today, and we'd have fewer people calling for mixing politics and religion.